Reviewed by Harriet Douty Dwinell

Lurking behind an inscrutable title is a fascinating slice of Americana. Inscrutable as the title may be, however, it paradoxically describes the book’s contents.

Anonymous. The book narrates the lives of three women who helped change the face of American media in the first half of the 20th century but got no credit. These women worked behind the scenes, the “unacknowledged partners” of their groundbreaking, or at least famous, husbands. One husband, Edward Bernays, created the field of modern public relations, wrote the textbook, and represented the giants of industry. A second, Heywood Broun, was considered the greatest newspaper journalist of his time. A third, Harold Ross, was a founder of the New Yorker.

[I]n Their Own Names. Even though these women toiled anonymously, they boldly did so under their maiden names. As such they locked horns with the United States government and endured such embarrassments as having a child’s birth certificate stamped “illegitimate.”

Doris E. Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant. These are the women. Ever heard of them?

Susan Henry, professor emeritus of journalism at California State University, Northridge, never heard of them either — until she was startled by a 1980 obituary of Fleischman based on a press release put out by her husband, Edward Bernays, the aforementioned father of public relations. Bernays’ press release described Fleischman, his wife, as “pioneer counsel on public relations.” How was it, Henry wondered, that neither she nor her colleagues who taught courses in journalism and public relations had never heard of Fleischman?

Henry then did the usual academic thing: brought Fleischman’s history into her classroom and later, as a journal editor, accepted an article about Fleischman’s husband, Bernays. When the idea of expanding Fleischman’s story into a book took possession, Henry looked around for others to include. She settled on Ruth Hale and Jane Grant, early newspaper reporters like Fleischman and, more importantly, instrumental in founding the Lucy Stone League, an organization dedicated to helping women keep their maiden names, inspired by the 19th-century women’s rights activist thought to be the first American woman to do so. The struggle for women to keep their maiden names, commonplace today, touched off Herculean battles. A simple application for a passport under one’s maiden name (Fleischman was the first to be granted one), for example, ignited a correspondence between the secretary of state and the president of the United States!

Activities of the Lucy Stone League and interactions among the women and their spouses provide a secondary focus to the book, so that Anonymous in Their Own Names is part collective biography and part feminist history. The two parts exist in an uneasy and unequal marriage. At times Henry glides past, say, an encounter between Doris Fleischman and Ruth Hale, as if readers have no idea who Fleischman is, even though they had earlier been gripped by Fleischman’s personal history. Similar encounters take place at legendary poker games or around the Algonquin Round Table.

What did these people say to one another? What did they think? Only occasionally do we find out. After meeting Harold Ross during the 1918 Paris Peace Conference, Bernays reported that Ross was “uncouth, uncultured, and … acted like a boob.” No doubt, Anonymous in Their Own Names would have been a more unified book — and perhaps for that reason more satisfying as a book — had it centered around the League and other feminist issues, but readers would have been denied entry into the wonderfully messy, contradictory, human lives that lay beneath.

No one can say that Susan Henry has not done her homework. Her observations are supported by 1,178 notes, some dwelling on such details as apparent gaps in employment history, which seem minor. Of greater importance (I wouldn’t say, “concern”) is unevenness in the nature of the biographies because each is funded principally by very different source material. Information about the lives of Doris Fleischman and Ruth Hale comes primarily from family members in personal interviews conducted by Henry, or from published memoirs and as such is generally uncorroborated.

Thus, for example, in the case of Fleischman, readers must accept the words of a contrite Edward Bernays, who in the last decades of a long life desires to recognize the contribution — always behind the scenes — of Fleischman to his (their) firm which he withheld during her lifetime. At the same time, documentary evidence reveals Fleischman as a woman who tried to effortlessly (i.e., without her husband’s knowledge) to maintain a busy household that supported 11 live-in servants, providing them each morning with “a daily schedule, divided into fifteen- or thirty-minute intervals,” with the frequent end-goal of an evening dinner party for 30.

At mid-century Fleischman appeared to tire of it all. In a best-selling autobiography, she elevated her domestic life in ways that her daughters called pure bunk, describing a life filled with sewing, cooking and mother-daughter intimacy. The woman who on her marriage signed a 50-50 business partnership with her husband, toiling night and day, confessed, “I didn’t feel I owned half the money, or any of it. The money, I felt, and still feel, belongs to him, and it is generous of him to let me use it for myself.”

Similarly, evidence for Ruth Hale’s contribution to the career of her husband Heywood Broun, “the nation’s most popular, influential [and best-paid] newspaper columnist,” rests on interviews with their son, Heywood Hale Broun (Woodie) conducted decades after Hale’s death, and his memoir, Whose Little Boy Are You: A Memoir of the Broun Family.

Even though Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun began married life as career equals and reporters in Europe during World War I, somehow, on their return, Broun’s star rose while Hale’s sank. At some point, Woodie speculates, a “full-scale collaboration” began when Hale, a former drama critic, began helping Broun as a drama critic, “by recommending works, helping him understand them, talking through what he should address … and finishing reviews when he was late.”

Hale turned her career into Broun’s, eventually helping with freelance articles, suggesting topics and “probably finish[ing] them.” Asked to join five “eminent experts” of the newly formed Book of the Month club in selecting each month’s choice and alternates, the lazy Broun found the prospect of reading dozens of long galleys each month daunting. Hale took up the challenge. “Each month she read the nominated books, chose the best one for Broun to recommend, then the night before the judges’ meeting spent several hours preparing him to talk about all the books under consideration. She coached him to defend his choice by pointing out its strengths as well as the weaknesses of the other books.”

If the portraits of Doris Fleischman and Ruth Hale are filled with stories and assertions that cry out for corroboration, the opposite is true about the section on Jane Grant, who was perhaps the most extraordinary of the three. The portrait of Grant, first wife of Harold Ross and co-founder of the New Yorker, seems “different,” more polished and authoritative but less alive, less intimate. All the principals were dead by the time Henry began her book, but much documentary material existed both in books about Ross and the New Yorker (including Grant’s own memoir) and in massive files in the Jane Grant archives at the University of Oregon.

From this material, Grant is presented as a good-time gal from the hinterland who comes East and makes good, becoming the first general assignment reporter for the New York Times. Thus, I was astonished to read, for example, that an angry Ross said, “The reason I left Jane Grant … was that I never had one damned meal at home at which the discussion wasn’t of women’s rights and the ruthlessness of men in trampling women.” The Jane Grant presented up to this point was the party gal who worked all day and danced all night and had more suitors than you could shake a stick at. This is not to say that Henry is not convincing at attributing both the founding and several savings of the New Yorker to the efforts of Jane Grant. She is. But Grant never seems to come alive as a human being.

Nevertheless, Susan Henry is to be roundly applauded for bringing to light the lives and accomplishments of these little-known women. Just how little-known are they? At this writing, Wikipedia, that barometer of popular knowledge, reports the following:

Jane Grant is acknowledge as the “co-founder” of the New Yorker but there is no recognition of her crucial role in later “saving” it.

Ruth Hale is identified as a “feminist” and a former spouse of Heywood Broun. No recognition is made of her help in his career.

Ruth Fleischman has no entry. Her name is part of Bernays’ entry, as his wife. It is not hyperlinked.

Let’s hope this engaging book alters those entries.

Harriet Douty Dwinell, director of the editorial board of The Washington Independent Review of Books, is a Washington writer and editor.